


Running On Empty

by Jessa



Series: One-shots and Drabbles [11]
Category: Reylo - Fandom, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Canon Compliant, Explicit Language, F/M, Pre-TFA, Voyeurism, references to masturbation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-12
Updated: 2018-12-12
Packaged: 2019-09-16 21:36:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16961928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jessa/pseuds/Jessa
Summary: Pre-TFA. This is a re-post. Rey's on Jakku. Kylo's about to land. Something intrigues them both. Someone...





	1. Speeders

**Author's Note:**

> All of these chapters were written in response to prompts set by two-halves-of-reylo on tumblr in 2018. These drabbles are among some of the first stuff i ever wrote for SWST fandom. I hope you enjoy reading them. Please comment if you feel the urge and let me know what you think - i love hearing what you think!! And apologies if you've already read these as they are re-posts. Love ya xx

The engine sputters and dies.

 _Fuck_ , Rey thinks.  _Out of fuel._

She swings her leg over the speeder and in her frustration doesn’t quite hitch it high enough to avoid the blistering metal. Her calf slides along the dusty duco and she feels the burn. She swears again. Now she’ll have to  _walk_  back to the Concession Stand. She’d consumed the last of her water at least a half hour ago. Fortunately, the heat of the day has passed so at least she’ll be walking in the cooling desert.

Still feeling the burn against the back of her calf, Rey tries to put it out of her mind as she yanks the net off the side of the speeder and starts to sift through the scavenged parts. She can’t carry it all.

 _What will score the most portions?_  she thinks.

Eventually she settles on the transvertor and two deflector ducts. They’d taken her ages to find and she just can’t bring herself to leave them behind.

Rey swings the net over her shoulder, along with her haversack and staff, and begins the trek back. Perhaps she can make a game of the walk. She can already see the silhouette of the main gate on the horizon, which marks the edge of town. It won’t take  _that_  long.

 _I can do this_ , she thinks.

“Looks like you’re empty.”

Rey swings around, flooring the bags and gripping her staff.

 _“Who’s there?”_  she yells, sounding a lot braver than she feels as she stands with her feet wide, staff held parallel to the sand in front of her in a battle stance. Ready to fend off whoever it is who’s just spoken.

“Don’t be afraid. I didn’t mean to startle you. I just noticed you were out of fuel.”

Rey whips around again.

“Fucking  _show_  yourself,  _coward!_ ”

“You can’t see me?”

Rey spins again on her heels, circling slowly now and eyes darting – as are her feet – as she searches desperately for the source of the deep male voice. If she wasn’t so fucking confused as to where it was coming from she might be finding it sexy.

“Who are you?  _Where the fuck_  are you?”

“Who am I?”

“Yes.” 

“Can you see me now?”

“No!” Rey cries again still spinning, staff ready, although the sound of the voice is even and mellow. It  _is_ sexy. She finds it oddly calming. And she also finds that now she is lowering her staff and doing less spinning in her panic to defend herself. She’s slowing. And her racing heart is slowing too.

And then Rey sees him. Tall as fuck. Dark. She blinks and shakes her head.

_I am definitely hallucinating._

“You’re not,” he breathes.

Rey blinks again.

“You’re cute when you do that.”

Rey’s heart begins to race anew.

“What?” she says.

The very smallest inkling of a smile begins to play on the edges of his pillowy lips.

 _Pillowy? What the fuck?_  she thinks.

But they  _are_  pillowy. And he is  _hot_. A dark tumble of hair. Dark brows and even darker eyes. His gaze smoldering, hotter than a heat oasis.

“You want some help fixing that?”

“What?” Rey says, again.

“I could help you,” he says. “If you’re the kind of girl who accepts help from strange men. But you’re probably not.”

_“What?”_

“But that’s okay. I would understand. You don’t know me at all and you look like you can handle yourself.”

“It’s out of  _fuel_ ,” Rey says, plainly. “It’s not really something you can  _fix_.”

“Yeah. But I used to race speeders with my father. Not quite like this. This looks like a custom job. But there’s a trick to it. I could show you if you like. It  _might_  work…”

“A trick?” Rey says, curious.

“Yeah,” he replies.

Rey looks at him again.

“Who  _are_  you?” she says again.

“I’m here on business.”

_“Business?”_

“Yeah. There’s some stuff I gotta do.”

Rey frowns. He certainly doesn’t look like he’s from around here. Way overdressed for desert heat in his heavy black robes. 

“You’re kind of overdressed,” she tells him.

“Yeah, this place is fucking hot,” he admits. “You look... good.”

Rey stares down at herself.

 _Good?_  she thinks.

“Um... thanks.”

Rey squirms, thinking now that she’d maybe like to say more to him, but doesn’t.

He smiles.

_Holy shit, can he hear my thoughts?_

He drops his eyes.

_Fucking hell, he can!_

Rey looks at him again.

“Who are you?” she asks, yet again.

“Just someone who couldn’t help but notice you. And wants to help you. If you’ll let him.”

Rey drops her staff.

He smiles again. Wow,  _that_ is a nice image. Rey blinks again and feels her jaw relax as her own mouth starts to twitch at the corners now.

“Um, so...,” she begins, raising her eyebrows slightly and motioning to the speeder.

“Oh, yeah,” he says.

Carefully, he closes the gap between himself and the speeder and kneels down in the shadows.

Rey can tell he knows what he’s doing. His hands move deftly around the body of the vehicle as he firstly feels for the fuel cap – which she knows is not easy to find – and then swiftly removes it.

Priding herself on fixing machines like this – especially ones that are the result of her own work – Rey is curious to know what he’s  _actually_  doing and finds herself all of a sudden by his side at the speeder, kneeling down in the sand next to him.

Rey didn’t think she’d made a sound as she’d landed on her knees, but she must have because he looks up at her then.

 _Fuck, he is gorgeous up close_ , she thinks.

Rey feels her breath catch in her throat and her heart race again. Her stomach wriggles and something else starts lower down. A pulse between her thighs. All of a sudden she can’t tear her eyes away from him and...

_He feels the same. What?_

How can she possibly know that?

His mouth opens by just the smallest margin.

_Can you read me?_

_What?_  she thinks again.

_In your head. You can hear me. And you can feel me. Can’t you?_

Rey stands and in a flash her staff is back in her hands and she is braced and ready to fight him.

“I don’t know who you are,” she says, menacingly, “But you’re fucking freaking me out. I don’t need your help. Fuck off.”

At her words, she watches as his expression suddenly plummets. The soft smile that’s been lightening his face is gone and replaced by a sadness that Rey can oddly feel.

Rey  _certainly_  isn’t sad. She is full of fury and fear, but mostly fury. The sun is getting low now and this is wasting her time. The stand will be closed and she’ll go hungry with no portions after a whole day’s work and only half a haul because she’s run out of fuel and had to walk back.

But Rey is right. She  _can_  somehow feel his sadness now.

He looks down at the sand, in shadow. She notices, now, his gloved hands. He stares at them for a moment. Then he tweaks something behind the fuel cap. Rey thinks it’s the fuel feeder lines and the engine of the speeder suddenly kicks back to life. 

 _Clever_ , she thinks.

Rey probably wouldn’t have thought of that but will remember it.

 _Thanks_ , he thinks back as he replaces the cap.

And again, somehow, she can hear him in her head.

As he fades away from her view, he looks at her for a final time and she sees and feels the sadness in him again. A yearning she knows is loneliness. Because Rey feels lonely too.

And later on, when she’s alone and lonely in the dark night of the AT-AT she calls home, Rey will be sure to remember him.


	2. Fear

As her glacial words ring in his ears, Ben looks down toward the shadowed sand below her speeder, but it’s not what he’s seeing. His gaze is fixed on her reflection, distorted in the chrome forms of the vehicle. She is terrifying and he is afraid. 

Ben can’t help but feel the same thing again now that he felt when he’d first noticed her earlier, as he’d watched her fight off the gang of Teedos. The reason he’d watched.

Her stance had intrigued him initially. It was so unconventional and yet so effective. Her blows with the quarterstaff - such a primitive weapon of choice in his opinion - were devastating, but it was her gaze that had made him keep watching. Her eyes were furious and he had felt fear, and as he watches her again now he is still afraid. She is beautiful and he is afraid of this, too. 

Aware that she had somehow read him earlier Ben buries these thoughts deep in his head. Fear fueled the power he drew from the Darkness within him. He never gifted it to enemies. And if she makes him afraid, is this not what she is? A sadness begins in him now. He tries to stuff it down.

Under the pretense of studying his gloves, and still making sure to keep his thoughts buried, Ben contemplates this. How long had it been since he’d been afraid of a  _girl?_  But this was no girl. She was a woman. He’d never been much good with those, and as he engages the reserve valve - to feed fuel through the lines - he thinks of his idiotic father, goading him about it.

 _Clever,_  he hears her think through the Force, as she hears the engine kick back to life.

Is she conscious of praising him? Or is this a slip? She’d inferred he was a creep earlier and he supposes he probably is. Well, at least he’s a clever creep. He hedges his bets.

 _Thanks_ , Ben thinks back, allowing the thought to find its way to her as he replaces the fuel cap on her speeder.

Still bowed in its shadows, Ben looks up at her for a final time. Her gaze is no longer furious and as she fades from his vision he finds himself afraid for a different reason. She feels a sadness he already knows. 

 _Foolish idiot,_  he thinks to himself, as the cold air of his chambers begins to cool his skin and the fabric of his garments, which have absorbed so much of the desert heat.

But the thought of her lingers and so too does the realization that she had felt the same as him. Ben feels the conflict in him build.

 _Empathy makes you weak, kill it,_  he reminds himself as he paces the cold, gunmetal grey of the floor of his room.  _Or Supreme Leader will sense it._

The loneliness that had compelled him to search that over-heated excuse for a planet in the first place grips him once more.

 _Kill it,_  he tells himself again, as he feels his fists clench.

Her furious gaze returns to his mind and he drives one of his gloved fists into a section of wall panelling. 

 _Kill it,_  he thinks again, as he feels the pain blossom in his knuckles and grip his solar plexus.

As the fleet begins its preparations for the raid that will follow later on, Kylo Ren absorbs the pain like Jakku sand absorbs water as he sees her once more. Her eyes soft and sad. Beautiful.

_Kill it._

And Ben’s fear lingers.


	3. Home (Rey)

The burn she’d collected earlier while carelessly dismounting her speeder still smarts. In the encroaching cold of the desert evening, and as her fingers hover above it, Rey can still feel the radiant heat. Gingerly, she touches it with her fingers.

 _Fuck_ , she mutters, grimacing.

She can still feel the sting. Sleeping will be difficult tonight. She’ll have to lie on her stomach, which she doesn’t mind, but she won’t be able to lie with her calf covered by a blanket, which she  _will_ mind. The lack of cloud cover in the sky during Jakku nights sends the scorching heat of the day straight up.

 _The galaxy must be warm_ , thinks Rey, as she flips the poncho over her head and pulls it down below her nose and mouth, wriggling her arms through the slits at either side and shifting it sideways. If she can’t use blankets, she’ll just have to wear lots of layers tonight to stay warm.

Rey thinks again of the events that happened earlier. The guy. Where in the hell had he come from? How does someone just appear out of nowhere like that? He’d been hot.  _That_ thought would keep at least  _some_ of her warm tonight…

She knew the myths. Knew the unsubstantiated stories about mysterious powers in the galaxy. Things that weren’t possible, but that somehow were.  _He’d_ been mysterious.  _He’d_ been mesmerizing. And he’d said she was ‘cute’. He’d said she’d looked ‘good’. And then she’d told him to fuck off.

 _Moron_ , she thinks to herself.  _No wonder you’re alone._

The half-portion of food she’d put on minutes ago is ready. Ravenous, she devours it too quickly as usual. It’s never enough. There is always still a hole in the pit of her stomach and she often goes to bed still feeling it. Trying to block it out but also wanting it to continue.  _That_ type of hunger made her hunger less for the  _other_ type.

 _He’d  _ _been hungry for that,_ she thinks wistfully, still baffled by how she’d known it.

Outside the Walker, the desert world has grown dark. The inside of the felled relic Rey calls home is lit by the diodes she’s scavenged over years. Their ambient light colors the interior with a multiplicity of hues and often, in the evenings when she’s here, Rey likes to pretend she’s a pilot. That the darkness beyond them is the black void of space and the diodes denote the console she  _could_ use to captain her own escape.

 _If only_ , she thinks.

But as much as she likes this fantasy, sometimes all Rey wishes for is just a small window. To let the light in. Not the artificial stuff of circuitry, but the  _real_ light. The light of the galaxy. She’s often thought about fashioning one. It wouldn’t be difficult.

 _Just use some tool to jemmy off a couple of the interior panels,_ she thinks, as she runs her fingertips across them, imagining the cuts she would then make through the exterior casing with something like laser snips, or a thin-gauge steel torch.  

 _Actually, it would be really nice down here_, she revises in her head as she presses her fingers slightly to the right of where she’s always thought a window might go.

Rey places the very scant remains of her meal on the floor beside her, barely a crumb. Lying down on her stomach, across her makeshift bed, she wriggles herself deep into the low recess so she can reach out and touch the small, angled corner at the end of it. Her bedding is tucked in beneath this. She finds the small space comforting. A little cocoon. A little embrace.

 _Just here_ , she thinks again, touching the paneling with her flattened palms now and dreaming of what she’d see if it were gone.

Once the hole was cut she could install one of the precious pieces of transparisteel she’s been saving for such a purpose, so that when the sandstorms hit she’d still be protected. She could look out at the sunrise in the mornings. She could fall asleep looking at the stars of the system and dream of the day when her family would return to her. Will them to. She imagines it now.

_You don’t live with your family?_

Rey bangs her head on the panel above her as in her shock she forgets where she is.

 _“Fuck!”_ she cries as pain blossoms through the crown of her head.

_I’m sorry._

She mutters several more curses under her breath as she wriggles out of the recess and then rubs her head vigorously as she kneels on her bedding.

“Fucking  _fuck_ ,” she mutters.

_Are you okay?_

As the pain eases, Rey realizes that the voice is familiar as at the same time she’s aware that she’s not actually hearing it. It’s inside her head. She shakes it, blinks, and looks around to make sure. Pain has always made her braver and so instead of flipping out – as she’d done earlier when this first happened – she just comes right out and says it to him.

“Should I be able to see you? Or is this just a… head thing again?”

She  _feels_ him smile, and that feeling  _has_ to be his because Rey is certainly  _not_ smiling, her head still throbbing like Teedo just hit her with an ion spear.

_Is that a technical term? Head thing?_

Still rubbing the crown of her head, Rey rolls her eyes. She is  _not_ in the mood for games. Perhaps if she hadn’t hit her fucking head she might feel differently but she can feel a lump  _and_ a headache blooming now and knows that the ache will only worsen if she goes to sleep with it. That means she’ll need to stay up until it goes and then, without enough sleep, she’ll be tired tomorrow and less effective. Less alert. Less quick.

 _Less parts, less portions_ , she thinks as she sighs aloud.

 _I’m sorry,_ she hears him repeat in her head.

 _“What do you want?”_ Rey asks, only half intending for the words to sound as harsh as they actually had.

_Nothing, I’ll leave you._

Again, Rey feels sadness that is not consistent with her own feelings of irritation. Already annoyed by her encroaching headache – and what it will mean tomorrow – now she’s also angry that he’s bothered her for nothing. At least the first time he’d been useful. This time, all she’s left with is a migraine.

“And quit  _watching_ me,” she adds, unsure of whether or not she really means it, and then the sad feeling fades and Rey knows that he’s gone.


	4. Home (Ben)

He supposes he should probably sleep, or at the very least rest. Night raids tended to leave his body coursing with adrenaline in the aftermath of what were usually kills. The screaming tended to echo for a long time in his ears and the smells definitely ghosted his nostrils long after he’d scrubbed himself clean in the fresher.

He walks to his bed and seats himself on the edge of its firm mat. Nothing about its surface is comfortable, and that’s how he likes it. This place is not a home. This place is the antithesis of the only place Ben has ever known as that. On Chandrila. And that’s how Kylo Ren likes it.

 _Kill it_ , Ben thinks as he tries to quash the memory of his childhood with the pain that still lingers in his knuckles. From when he’d allowed his fist to collide over and over with the wall of his chambers earlier, trying to forget the girl. The scavenger he’d found on the planet which took its name from the system in which the fleet now waited for the deep of the night. For the Resistance to be at its most vulnerable. Only then would they strike and collect what they’d come to claim. The map.

Ben removes his boots with the intention of lying down until he senses the lull in the Force he knows means time to move. He has a few hours. Perhaps he can sleep. Or at the very least think about her. He feels a tug in the pit of his stomach as he lets her image swim before him. He removes his gloves and lays them carefully on the cold steel of the nightstand beside his bed. Slowly, he rubs his thumb against the side of his forefinger, feeling his own touch but imagining hers. Nervous, he closes his eyes and reaches out through the Force.

He remembers how she’d felt. That’s how he’d first found her. It was his sensation of her through the Force that had piqued his interest and made him then want to see her. She had felt special. She had felt, somehow, like him. But different. Somehow,  _very_ different. As though…

_What the hell is she doing?_

His jaw drops as he watches the curves of her arse wriggle beneath something. He feels the tug again in the pit of his stomach and his cock twitch.

 _Kill it_ , says something in the back of his head but he mutes that voice as he lets his gaze linger.

Now she is still.

 _Wriggle,_ he thinks, longing to feel the twitch in his cock again.

Carefully, not wanting her to feel him do it, he enters her mind to plant the thought there but is distracted by the thoughts that she’s already immersed in. Something about family… She’s longing for her family. She’s imagining them. Returning. He had not expected this. Although he knew vaguely of how Plutt liked to run the otherwise lawless world of Jakku, he’d still assumed slavery was not something human women were subjected to there. He frowns as her apparent predicament suddenly flies in the face of what he thought he’d known.

_You don’t live with your family?_

Ben can’t help but smile as he hears her curse. This had piqued his interest too, earlier, as he’d Force-projected to her in the desert’s afternoon. He admired her pluck. She wasn’t coy. She wasn’t  _girlish_. He supposes he should apologize. As before, he hadn’t meant to startle her.

 _I’m sorry,_ he offers.  _Are you okay?_

“Should I be able to see you? Or is this just a… head thing again?”

 _Is that a technical term?_ Ben thinks with amusement, as he uses the Force to gently slip the thought to her.  _Head thing?_

Too much. Now she was pissed at him.

 _I’m sorry_ , he thinks again.

_“What do you want?”_

Her tone is as cold as when she’d told him to fuck off. Ben’s stomach sinks.

_Nothing, I'll leave you._

He digs the nail of his thumb into his forefinger, creating pain. It’s not enough. He presses harder.

_Kill it._

And harder.

“And quit  _watching_ me,” Ben hears her say aloud as his lower lip begins to tremble.

And once his vision of her is gone, and he looks down at his hand, he presses even harder as he spies his own blood, spilt by the cut he’s made with his nail.

 _Kill it_ , Ben repeats, as he drives it deeper until the feeling in the pit of his stomach, the twitch in his cock, is overridden by the sharp pain he now feels in the side of his forefinger as it merges with the residual pain still radiating from his knuckles.

Grimacing, Ben unclenches his fist and throws himself back on the hard surface of his bed, breathing heavily and lip still trembling.

 _Kill it_ , the voice says once again in the back of his head but again Ben ignores it.

 _She is lonely, too_ , he thinks, and his hand can't help but reach for the zip on his pants.


	5. Survival

The leg covers were something she’d made once out of sheer boredom. She’d had the pilot coveralls for some time and knew one day the unique material used to make them would be useful. Everything was in the end. Survival had a way of making sure you wasted  _nothing._

Rey is not about to fall asleep anytime soon and knows it. The cold is creeping in quickly to the interior of the Walker and she has begun to feel it already. She knows that it won’t be long before she’s able to see her own breath in front of her, and watch it collect on the inside of the durasteel paneling above her as she lies on her modest bed.

Sometimes, so much condensation collects that it drips down and dampens the sandy floor in places, like the water she wishes would fall outside but rarely comes. It shocks her. How cold must it be out there at  _those_  times?

The leg covers return to the front of her mind and she thinks again of the burn. If only she could somehow collect that heat and temper it to warm her whole body, rather than just blister one small patch of her skin so much that the pain of it prevents her from sleeping. And now she returns to the problem. Which can she more comfortably survive? The burn, or the cold?

Rey opts for the burn. She leans out of her bed and stretches across the floor space until her hand finds one of the large haversacks she uses to store her garments in. She always ensures to carefully fold and stack the cleanest ones inside the bags. They are meticulously organized. Bagging them prevents too much of the sand from working its way through them, although it’s impossible to prevent this entirely, and she often finds that she’ll start out for the day and realize there’s sand down her crack already.

 _Par for the course,_ she thinks.

Her hand fumbles momentarily over softer fabrics she can feel at the top of the haversack, which she knows are the breathable gauzes of her under garments and arm wraps. Then she feels the heavy, course weave of the covers and gently yanks at them. Well, she  _thought_ she’d been gentle.

The bag tips, topples and suddenly clothes are sprawled across the sand from one side of the Walker to the other.

 _“Fuck,”_ she curses in frustration.

She knows the morning will now be spent cleaning up the chaos and that this bore of a chore will delay her departure out to scavenge. She doesn’t want to think of the ramifications of that irritation right now so she shoves it out of her mind. She will deal with it tomorrow.

Sighing, Rey pulls the covers roughly and sand flicks up and into her face, some of it working its way into her eye. She curses again and sits up, rubbing at her eye and blinking it out as she leans forward. This is going from bad to worse.

She closes the eye and stands. There is just enough room between the angled walls in this part of the interior that she can do this – just – without hitting her head. She’s learnt over the years how to avoid the overhangs, although she’d struggled with it at first as  _she’d_ grown but her home had not.

But these days, her adult body has learned how to survive in the space, and even work with it. Bangs and scrapes are now only usually collected in the world outside, when once her constantly expanding limbs were always colliding with the inside of the AT-AT.

Rey braces herself for the pain of what she knows will follow. She steps into the holes of the leg cover bottoms and then in one quick and swift motion she pulls them up to her hips.

 _“Fucking_ hell,” she cries, as a searing pain shoots across her burn and through her nervous system.

Her breath hitches and her chest goes tight as she feels it, afraid to inhale in case that makes it worse. Her breath is quick and light. Her mouth purses into a tight ‘o’ and she continues to breathe like this until, at last, the pain begins to subside.

She fastens the pants. Already she can feel warmth collecting around her legs as the insulated fabric of the covers traps the heat from her body against her skin.

Very slowly, Rey side steps back to the edge of the bed and then, gingerly, lies down again on her stomach. The pain of the fabric brushing against the still raw burn is something she can still feel, but it has subsided enough that she can bear it. She props herself up on one elbow and reaches behind her for the blankets, which had bunched at the bottom of the bed as she’d reached across the floor for the bags.

She pulls them up and over her back and then lies down again on her front, facing the wall, with her head tucked under the overhang. Back in the nest. The pain of the burn continues to moderate.

 _This is okay,_ she thinks.  _I can survive this._

Slowly, the core of Rey begins to warm and she feels herself become almost cozy. Again, her thoughts drift to the window she will build.

 _One day,_ she thinks.

Rey wriggles deeper below her blankets, bringing her arms up and under her chin and then turning her head so that her cheek rests on the other side, facing in, and very slowly his image emerges from the diode-lit darkness.

He is watching her again.


	6. Droids

He lies on his back and lets his breathing rule him, but the brief feeling of ecstasy is quickly replaced by the familiar sickness of nerves. Ben sits up.

 _“Control it,”_  he hisses at himself, afraid.

He inhales, over-filling his lungs so they hurt. He clenches the muscles of his stomach, holding the oxygen-rich air tight inside him to saturate his internal tissues with as much of it as possible.

Ben knows this works. He’s done it before. He feels the decrease in his heartrate almost instantly, and after a full minute lets himself exhale the air slowly, air that is now almost entirely comprised of nitrogen. He has returned himself to a calm state and reduced the likelihood of his true feelings being sensed.

When he’d first tried this, he’d used one of his own medical droids to deliver pure oxygen via respirator. Same technique. He’d made sure to erase the unit’s hard drive afterward in case Supreme Leader sensed it, or in case the droid had for some reason fallen out of his service and been scanned. He knew Hux had done this in the past to decommissioned units that had formerly belonged to Kylo Ren. There was no one here he trusted, and certainly last on the list of those he might was Hux.

_Leave no trace._

But that’d been weird. It had left Ben feeling even lonelier than just jerking off usually did. Plus he’d sensed there was a way he could do it himself without the use of a droid – quickly calm his breathing after cumming – and after some practise, he’d perfected the saturation method by drawing on trance techniques he hadn’t used in years, and that his wretched relative had first introduced him to at Temple. Breath control. Mind over matter. That’s all this was.

Skywalker had certainly never intended for Ben to use meditation for these purposes, but Ben had never had much time for that purest turd, or how he thought Ben should best make use of his own powers. After all, this was the uncle who’d tried to murder him.

Ben stands, strides to the ‘fresher and dumps the cum rag at the base of it before removing his garments and stepping inside. As he stands below the stream of recycled water, face tilted up to meet it and eyes closed, his mind drifts to her and he wonders what she’s doing.

 _Par for the course_ , Ben hears her think as the connection opens.

 _Fuck, she’s odd,_  he thinks, as he begins to watch her.

Odd, and yet somehow mesmerizing. The bag she’s seemingly in the middle of reaching for tips. She swears, and he feels his cock twitch. He likes it when she swears. He lets his eyes wander. He can see the burn on her calf, and for some reason feel it, too, against his own. He touches that same place on his body as he watches her pull up the curious garment she’s fashioned for herself, from what looks like a set of dated Rebellion pilot coveralls. She swears again and he feels the pain that’s caused it, still unsure why they’re connecting like this.

Ben watches her lie down gingerly on her belly. She seems cold. Is that why she’s doing this? Is she trying to warm herself? He narrows his eyes and tilts his head forward, trying to see her more clearly. Slowly, the surroundings in which she’s situated emerge in more detail.

He watches her turn her head on what he can only assume is a pillow, although it looks to him like nothing more than scrunched rags. Ben can see her face now, her hazel eyes wide. They look in his general direction, as though she’s thinking, but then he realizes that her eyes are indeed looking  _at_ him. He has manifested in her surroundings and she can see him, but how he knows not.

Ben watches her eyes narrow, suspicious.

“Are you…  _wet?”_  she asks, apparently noting the water on his face and in his hair.

Still in the ‘fresher, Ben feels his cock twitch for a second time. He longs to pursue this line of questioning – perhaps flip it around – but he doesn’t dare. Automatically, the nail of his thumb goes straight to the side of his forefinger again and presses to the spot that he’d earlier cut open on purpose – to create an intense physical hurt – and override the feeling she’d sparked in him. Quite the reverse of the pain he’s trying to feel now.

Ben knows he needs the pain to stay fearful. And he needs the fear to prevent himself from doing something he’ll regret. Something sparked by passion. Something that will land him in the shit for sure.

“How’s your burn?” he asks, changing the subject and closing down his mind so that she  _should_ only still have vision on his face.

“What would you care?” she replies, coldly. “All you do is watch me.”

“That’s not true. I helped you with your speeder.”

At this she doesn’t say anything. He watches her shift below the blankets. Reaching out through the Force, he can sense that she’s lowered her hands slightly to her chest, between her breasts. To further warm them? How warm must her body be  _there_ … He feels his cock twitch again.

“Why are you watching me?”

Ben doesn’t answer. The truth is that he no longer knows. He knew in the beginning. But now he’s not sure. He is nervous about the raid. Anxious. There are several reasons for this. But there is something else he senses. And it has something to do with her.

“So, what are you anxious about, then?” she asks.

Ben glares at her. As he’s thought about her body – how warm her hands must be where they currently are – he’s let his guard slip.

 _Fuck,_  he thinks, and he begins to shake with a rage that he saves to feel for only himself at times like this.

_So fucking weak. Again. You’re a fucking weak prick. No control._

Ben digs his nail in again and lets out a sharp hiss as he feels the cut deepening, stinging under the water still falling from the ‘fresher. He looks down, breaking the connection. Blood is tracking its way down his forefinger and dripping in bright flushes near his feet.

 _Good,_  he thinks, as he presses deeper before shutting off the water and looking around for a surgical droid to repair his broken body.


End file.
